Warhammer Universe
by Rattraveller
Summary: Just my view of the Warhammer 40K universe


People sometimes ask me what the universe of Warhammer 40,000 is like. Well close your eyes and imagine.

You wake up in a hospital. Not a shiny new modern hospital but an older Victorian Gothic hospital that looks like it has sat unattended for decades. It is not just one building but many buildings spread over many acres. Some of the buildings are connected by hallways while others you must cross open space to reach. When storms come, and storms are frequent, unpredictable and very violent you are cut off from parts of the hospital for hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years at a time. All of the hallways are dank and dark and absolutely require you to use a special lantern when traveling in them or you risk being snatched away and tortured into insanity.

You are not alone in this hospital. In fact, it is overcrowded with people but very few of them are your friends. Everyone is divided into factions which sometimes cooperate with each other and other times fight each other to the death. Some are familiar and closely resemble you. Others are more machine than human, and some are superhuman gene modified giants. All of these factions have their secrets and private agendas which they will kill you to keep. Fortunately, you are all bound by your worship of the God. This is not your Sunday school bible game worship. This is worship so strict it makes the Pilgrims look like employees and customers of a strip club. You are constantly watched for any sign of heresy and even more quickly punished for any transgression. For many do tread the path of heresy and turn on you suddenly and violently. These heretics are accompanied by mutants and those capable of using mind powers to destroy you.

All of this is not even the beginning of the threats you face. Outside the hospital are many races seeking your destruction. One is Orcs who live only to wage war. Not to create, not to even claim territory but just to fight and fight and fight for the sheer joy of battle. Even if you kill all of them, they arise again from their own dead bodies to get back into the fight. Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

Another race trying to kill you are elf like creatures that think you are no better than a beast living in the woods. Sometimes they will help you but more often than not they will try to kill you afterward. They too have their factions. One of those factions lives only to torture others and all of them know secret passages into the hospital.

Then there is the rampaging horde of ever mutating locusts who only want to eat everything. All your food, all your belongings, all of the races, all the buildings, everything.

Remember the Soviet Union and the great evil Empire it represented. There is one here too. Noseless and grey and demanding at gunpoint that you join the Greater Good for your own good for goodness sake and they have the powered armor suits to pull it off.

One race is not outside the hospital. They are the original staff of the hospital who are now coming back to work and are going to start cleaning up the hospital by removing everything that is not to their liking, like you. They are emerging from the many secret passages and hidden rooms threaded throughout the hospital.

Both inside and out looms what may be your greatest threat. For in this universe your life is not all that you can lose but your very soul is at stake. For here evil gods exist and seek the destruction of the hospital at all costs. They turn and twist the minds and bodies of your fellows and make them want to kill you. They also can leave their reality and enter yours so that you come face to face with all the demons you ever thought or imagined existed.

One thing your people hate more than anything is change. Long ago technology betrayed them so no advances in technology is allowed. You can fight and struggle, but you cannot change. You must use the same things and do things the same way as your ancestors or your own side will turn against you. Everything around you is falling apart and to try and repair it you must seek not repair people but priests to say litanies and prayers before performing the necessary work.

Got all that in your mind? Good. Now open your eyes and wake up. For you have been visiting your happy place. Time to rejoin the true horrors that make up the Warhammer 40,000 universe for it is far, far worse than you think it is.

Over the next few weeks I will be putting up some stories set in this Universe. These are third and fourth draft stories some constructive criticism is appreciated.


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